Call for Papers

While the amount of Linked Open Data (LOD) increases rapidly, it is still used mostly by Semantic Web experts. Two main obstacles make the billions of RDF triples already available hard to access for common Web users: the need to learn the query language SPARQL and the need to know the schemas underlying the datasets. Approaches to addressing these obstacles include graphical query interfaces, agent-based systems, and natural language interfaces. This workshop targets advances in the creation of natural language interfaces for the Web of Data as this category of interfaces is receiving an increasing interest due to their high expressive power and the ease of use. For example, recent progresses in speech recognition technologies (e.g., Siri, Google Voice) demonstrate the usefulness of natural-language interfaces for accessing large amounts of (partly structured) data. After the successful first edition of the workshop at ISWC 2014 with more than 40 participants, NLIWoD 2015’s goal is to bring together experts on the use of natural-language interfaces (NLI) for answering questions especially over the Web of Data. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Natural language query parsing

Natural language dialog systems

Term matching and entity disambiguation

Indexing

Query template generation

Query pattern generation

SPARQL query generation

Discovery of Linked Data sources

Dealing with data and schema heterogeneity

Answer aggregation

Answer rendering

Providing justifications of answers and conveying trust

Knowledge base design for QA

Language resources (data & open source software) for QA

Reasoning for QA

Natural Language querying of RDF exposed as linked data

Natural Language querying of Web Services

User feedback and interaction

Accepted papers will be published via ceur-ws.org. In addition, a special issue is currently being organized, to which the best papers of the workshop will be invited.

Submission Instructions

NLIWoD 2014 solicits the submission of original research papers in two types:

Full paper submissions (up to 16 pages) must describe substantial and original work.

Short paper submissions (up to 8 pages) must describe an original work which may present

a small, focused contribution,

a work in progress, or

an interesting application case.

All submissions must be in English and in PDF formatted the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer's Author Instructions. All papers are to be submitted via EasyChair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nliwod2015. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the Program Committee of the workshop. Submissions do not need to be anonymous.